I seen in pack canoes with low seating and narrow hulls they use a brace similar to what is common in kayaks. My canoe mod is somewhat of a hybrid trying to be a pack canoe. My seat is much higher and I have been paddling with no brace and it is ok, it has much more knee bend than a kayak or even a low-seated pack canoe.
Maybe it is I’m used to our hot tub with the seats having heel pads to keep you into the seat.
With the knees bent more with higher seating I wasn’t shooting as much for heal location as mid foot.
This is a bit more like sitting on a bar stool having a beer than sitting on my touring bike with clipped into the peddles.
You are right I much like the bar over single location pads as I can move my feet around at different spacing.
I really won’t know until I try it. Another reason I didn’t want it too high is I didn’t want to risk entrapment under it. I have some industrial double stick tape I might just try that before I bond it solid as well.
Seeing as how I have been showing all things DIY boat and car related and my DIY loader and rack. Today i bought a new storm door for the house and the DIY rack made hauling it home pretty easy. Strapped it down the same as the canoe and it worked great.
Well each time I go out I seem to rethink my setup a little and then experiment when I get home to see if I can tweak anything.
Some of you may think I lost my mind but I gave up on the foot brace for now as I think I would use it very little if at all with the type of paddling we normally do.
Then for day trips that we mostly do I found a smaller cooler that’s more than large enough for two people. I never was supper happy with the location of the larger cooler for getting into when paddling and the thwart that locked it in was a long stretch to use for getting in and out of the canoe.
Long story short I added another thwart and now I have a 14-7 canoe with 5 thwarts and really liking the setup.
I got rid of the kneeling pad as I almost never kneel and it would get wet and slide around. Making the cockpit shorter was not and issue and entering and exiting is improved. I can now drop one or both coolers in to suit what I’m doing and two is great for fishing one for food one for fish. I can also remove the one thwart if we take the dog or little nephew along and then have a larger area for them.
I’m not that worried about weight and the aluminum tube is so light the difference between 2 and 5 thwarts is not enough to notice. It is a really firm canoe though.
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Nov 17 and we got 8-10” over night. Lake effect. The boats are doing fine in winter hibernation. 
